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The Canterbury Tales (c. 1392) by Geoffrey Chaucer is a collection of tales
rich with characters who differ in social class and moral values. Despite these
differences, the women in The Canterbury Tales remain stereotypical to societal
expectations of the era. Reflecting a commonly held medieval view, women served as
second-class citizens, which often made them subservient to their male counterparts.
Valerie Edden states that women in this period were a little more than chattel (346).
Yet, the titular character in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” is a morally ambiguous counter
example, seeking power by elevating her socioeconomic status through her past
husbands. In “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” Alisoun’s sexual power over men is
undeniable, whereas the other women on the pilgrimage, the Prioress and the Second
Nun, value chastity. The Wife differs from the other women on the pilgrimage, as the
narrator describes her in the “General Prologue”: “She coude muchel of wandringe by
the weye. / Gattothed was she, smoothly for to seye” (ll. 46768). Laura Hodges
demonstrates how Chaucer uses double meanings in the Wife’s costume and
appearance to conflate her geographical and carnal knowledge (35960). In the Wife’s
prologue, the Wife exhibits agency in her ability to choose her lovers in the medieval
patriarchy, a system in which women lacked social sovereignty. Though the Wife
criticizes the medieval patriarchy through her sexual agency and individuality, her
rebellion against societal expectations is ironically undermined, since she empowers
herself by subverting male authority rather than attempting to redefine the terms of the
patriarchal system. The Wife rebels, yet she remains, nonetheless, trapped in such a
system. The Wife’s resistance is due to occurrences in both her prologue and her tale.
First, the tale undermines her resistance through the happy ending for the criminal
knight; second, the prologue does so through the limitations on the Wife’s female
agency, as she shares the same name with the object of desire in “The Miller’s Tale”;
and finally the prologue and tale should be understood through Alisoun’s
manipulation of Christian figures and Scripture.
The dominance of the patriarchy is underscored by the gender and social rank
of the protagonist of the Wife’s tale, a knight. Medieval society valued knights as
pinnacles of masculinity, as they are highly ranked in society and from aristocratic
backgrounds. Helen Phillips reports that knights were portrayed as the highest secular
exemplars of masculine ideals (300). English social hierarchy granted knights more
power than average citizens, often providing them with indemnity in cases of
malfeasance. Their reputations as courtly and heroic could protect them when they
were ethically ambiguous or in the wrong. The knight’s presence in the Wife’s tale is
significant because while this archetype suggests nobility and chivalry, the knight’s
status allows him to avoid beheading, the typical punishment for his rape of a maiden.
Instead, he is granted a second chance by the Queen: “I grante thee lyf, if thou canst
tellen me / What thing is it that wommen most desyren” (ll. 90405). When the knight
is exempted from his punishment, his rape is dismissed, allowing the audience to
focus on his adventure rather than the vile nature of his crime.
The Wife’s knight embodies the allpervasiveness of patriarchal ideology, both
in medieval culture and in the narrative itself. Rather than punishing the knight for the
sexual violence he inflicts on the maiden, the Wife rewards him by making him the
protagonist of the tale. Wendy Scase acknowledges that the Wife’s tale is a romance,
therefore “focus[ing] on the experience of the knight; it has nothing to say directly of
the viewpoint of the maiden who is raped by the knight, nor the motives and identity
of the old woman” (289). As a result, the Wife plays upon the patriarchal expectations
of her audience in valuing a man’s experience over that of a woman. Though the tale
is written by the Wife, where she discusses the question of “What thing is it that
wommen most desyren,” the moral of her tale is ultimately decided by a man (l. 905).
The tale’s focus on the knight reaffirms widely accepted misogyny present in her
medieval society, as it perpetuates the perception that violent acts against women are
often ignored.
Another ironic consequence of the violence toward the maiden is that the
perpetrator becomes the hero who resolves the tale. He is rewarded his life by the
court for discovering that women desire sovereignty in relationships, his response
being less than a lesson taught to a rapist than, as Sylvia Federico states, a
“patronizing wink between men who have been caught denying women their
sovereignty” (420). Federico discusses how Chaucer’s attempts to investigate what
rape means outside of courtly punishment does not necessarily excuse the author from
the levity with which he treats this horrendous crime. The knight returning from his
grandiose and romanticized journey with his meager answer emphasizes the limited
state of any agency women might have within the patriarchy. Many men of the
medieval period may have denied their wives the right to make decisions until they
were confronted directly for their misogynistic actions, like the knight in the Wife’s
tale. Federico’s description of the “patronizing wink” may also point out that actions
akin to those of the knight are a commonplace in a male-dominated society and that
misogynistic ideologies are often exempt from punishment.
The persistence of the patriarchy throughout the tale is further evident in the
way the Wife describes the knight’s being forced to uphold his promise and marry the
old woman who told him the secret of his quest. The Wife of Bath creates sympathy for
the knight when he responds to the old woman’s demand to marry her:
“My love?” quode he, “nay, my dampnacioun!
Allas! that any of my nacioun
Sholde evere so foule disparaged be!
But al for nought, the ende is this, that he
Constreyned was.” (ll. 106771)
The true victim, the maiden, disappears from the tale, and what continues to be in the
spotlight is the frivolous plight of the knight in his contract with the old woman. In the
medieval period, rape cases were often resolved through marriage, which lead to the
vicious standard that women who were raped by men were raped “with the goal of
marriage in mind” (Federico 421). Federico suggests that the knight “is assigned the
role of a rape victim […] to diminish the seriousness of the crime against the ‘mayde,’
who is so unambiguously raped at the beginning of the tale” (42122). The Wife of
Bath puts the knight in the position of an unwilling partner: “I seye ther nas no joye ne
feste at al” (l. 1078). She narrates in such a way that suggests a rape case being
resolved in marriage: “Ther nas but hevinesse and muche sorwe, / For prively he
wedded hire on morwe, / And al day after hidde him as an oule, / So wo was him, his
wyf looked so foule” (ll. 107982). The Wife’s rhetorical positioning of the knight as
the victim allows for her male audience to identify with his tainted character,
garnering sympathy for him and ignoring the actual rape victim herself. Even so, her
attempts to punish the knight’s actions are futile. Instead of women employing their
own selfagency, it is the knight who educates women in their desire for sovereignty.
Therefore, the Wife’s deflection of true victimhood is damaging because it shows how
women can be both silenced and made invisible in a maledominated society.
The magical transformation of the ugly, old “hag” into a beautiful young wife
reflects the patriarchal system of the time, as women possibly only could be granted
sovereignty by their male lovers in relationships. She is bestowed autonomy only
when the knight decides to give her the choice over her future, allowing her to
transform. Her impossible metamorphosis in the tale subverts a classic medieval
romance trope, which follows the typical pattern of an old and ugly woman becoming
beautiful on her wedding day after being granted sovereignty in their relationship.
Jackie Shead notes how Chaucer reverses this typical romantic trope: “First, the
choice she gives the knight on their wedding night is no longer whether she should
appear beautiful by night or by day, but whether he will have her ugly and faithful or
beautiful and risk being cuckolded.” Chaucer uses cuckoldry in contrast to
faithfulness, expanding on the desire for sex rather than focusing on physical
attractiveness. Through the tale, the Wife emphasizes how beautiful and young
women are assumed to make cuckolds of their husbands, reinforcing negative
depictions of women within medieval society, including that women are objects of
sex, lacking the strength to resist any sexual opportunity. Furthermore, the patriarchal
influence is evident as the Wife instills in her story these restrictive ideas that dissolve
female agency in her society. Women are only allowed to transform, becoming
beautiful and faithful, if their husbands grant them the power of choice within their
relationship, reinforcing the oppressive and omnipresent nature of a male-dominated
society.
Nevertheless, the Wife attempts to challenge conventional views of power in
marriage through the critique of male ownership of woman’s sexuality and agency.
The patriarchy is emphasized by the old woman solely having power over her “lover”
when she confines him into marriage, as she is the one assuming power in their
relationship. Therefore, as Phillips asserts, “Though the text interrogates these
conventional, gendered ideas of power and honor, it remains deeply imbued with
masculinist rhetoric” (301). The conventional, gendered ideas of power highlight how
the Wife uses her tale to rebel against patriarchal expectations of womanhood,
allowing her character, the old woman, to acquire sovereignty. The Wife’s rebellion is
diminished by her inability to subvert expectations of the time, as the old woman is
granted sovereignty by her husband rather than possessing it on her own,
demonstrating the limited role of women in maledominated society.
The Wife’s prologue and tale contradict each other, since Alisoun is agentive
in her control over men, and the old woman becomes complacent in her subservience
to the knight, effectively undermining the tale’s message of female autonomy.
Analyzing the old woman’s transformation, it can be argued that she is an oppressive
force, to the point of the knight fantasizing about death rather than marrying her. Once
the knight grants “false sovereignty” to the old woman, she transforms
That she so fair was and so yong therto,
For joye he hente hire in his armes two;
His herte bathed in a bath of blisse.
A thousand tyme arewe he gan hire kisse,
And she obeyed him in every thing
That might doon him pleasance or lyking (ll. 125156).
After the transformation, the old woman becomes subservient to her husband, catering
to idealized expectations of female marital roles. Contrasting the fate of the old
woman to that of the Wife sparks discussion as to why the Wife would depict the old
woman in such a way, considering that she and the old woman share numerous
characteristics. The prologue empowers the Wife, displaying her self-agency and
femininity through the power dynamics of her relationships and the subversion of
male vanity in marriages. Barbara Gottfried notes the boisterous, unrelenting nature of
the Wife in her prologue: “Her performance in her Prologue, humorous, aggressive,
and self-assertive, presents her audience with a version of her experience at once
expurgated and embellished” (203). When reading the prologue and Wife’s tale,
modern audiences view a disparity between the agency of the old woman and the
Wife, who possesses sovereignty over her husbands due to her resistance to societal
expectations of women in marriages. The Wife, untraditionally agentive, uses her
sexual prowess to assert authority over men, in contrast to the deceptive old woman’s
ultimate obedience to her husband. Although her tale of this fantastical society
suggests to the travelers that an obedient wife is ideal, the patriarchy distorts her
perception of what women are capable of in medieval society. As a result, the Wife
contradicts the characterized version of herself in the prologue with the inclusion of
the old woman’s transformation, as they both become wives who live to please their
husbands.
The Wife’s prologue also emphasizes how women use sex as one of the few
ways to empower themselves in a maledominated society. The prologue shows how
the Wife can only define herself as agentive in relation to the patriarchal culture which
equates her sex to power. She commences her journey of empowerment through
sexual prowess and deception at the age of twelve, easily attracting her husbands due
to marital expectations of the period. Gottfried explains: “At the same time, her
artfulness, and her appearance of having beaten men at their own game, deflect
attention” from the fact that her apparent victory is mitigated by her social context.
“Even as she attempts a deconstruction of patriarchal literature in an experiential
revision of it, the Wife necessarily falls short of the goal of overcoming authority
because she can only define herself in relation to that authority” (203). Through
manipulation, the Wife profits from her marital relationships. The Wife elevates her
economic status by using her sexual power to acquire her older husbands’ wealth.
Though the wife profits from deceiving her husbands, she never separates herself
from male authority. Therefore, the Wife struggles to overcome male rule since she
relies on marital relationships to acquire agency and power.
Despite the Wife’s use of marital relations as a means to empower herself, her
provocative pursuit of wealth is tolerated by men. Exploring the Wife and her
relationship to economics, Stewart Justman writes, “The bond between the sexual and
the economic is all the more persuasive in that the sexual condition of marriage
enables the Wife to get rich, and all the more provocative in that economic appetites
are tolerated distrustfully” (348). Justman then quotes R. H. Tawney, who states,
“‘Because they are powerful appetites, men fear them’” (348). Since the husbands’
elderliness limits accessibility to sexual partners, they welcome the Wife’s willingness
to marry, even though their romantic relationship disguises one of her few means to
pursue economic status.
The Wife integrates personal experiences into her tale, as she is traumatized by
her abusive experience with, Jankyn, her fifth husband. The role of Jankyn in the
prologue is like that of the knight in her tale; they both commit acts of violence
against the Wife or a character that embodies the Wife’s desires. As mentioned before,
even though the Wife “refutes and repudiates the conceptions of women disseminated
by the Church Fathers, her husbands, and the books of ‘wikked wives’ with which
they aggravate their predisposition to misogyny, she is haunted and indelibly marked
by them” (Gottfried 203). The Church’s influence allows for constructions of
misogynistic tendencies to manifest as abuse and malintent toward women for the
suggestion of their wantonness. The Wife is changed by her experience with her
husband as she implements him into her tale. Additionally, Robert Edwards asserts
that the fifth section devoted to Jankyn “serves in many ways as a thematic and
structural mirror for her subsequent tale of the knight-rapist” (328). Jankyn’s role
demonstrates how women voluntarily subordinate themselves to their husbands in
each relationship, which strips the empowerment from being a sexual object.
The order of the tales also emphasizes the unimportance of the female
experience in the medieval patriarchy. Prior to telling her story, the Wife attempts to
educate the men on the pilgrimage about the true desires of women and how they seek
power in their male-dominated society, but then she is interrupted by the Pardoner.
Robert Edward notes how the opening of her tale is “punctuated by the Pardoner’s il-advised
intervention, sound[ing] her themes of experience and authority” (328). By
listening and therefore abiding by the direction of men and their thoughts, the Wife
demonstrates that she remains complacent in the patriarchy. Instead of immediately
continuing her tale, she calms the Pardoner by assuring him that her tale will have
aspects that appeal to him. This acquiescence shows she ultimately caters to men and
their woes first, belittling the value of her experience or words of wisdom.
Additionally, the theme and positioning of “The Clerk’s Tale” in The
Canterbury Tales exemplifies men’s domination of the Wife in the grand scheme of
the tales. Traditionally, “The Clerk’s Tale” precedes the Wife’s tale, signifying the
precedence of a male character’s account to that of a female character. The Clerk is
disgusted by the idea of women’s sovereignty in a relationship and is determined to
prove what a “true” marriage should look like. The goal of “The Clerk’s Tale” is to
undermine the Wife’s untraditional sense of femininity and self-agency to confine
women to their righteous place within marriages and, by extension, society. Phillips
explains how “The Clerk’s Tale” is both a spiritual allegory and a misogynist slur on
modern wives that “endorses the message of wifely obedience” (304). The Clerk’s
sense of holy justice supersedes the profound and personal tale told by the Wife, and
his ignorance of women replaces the moral of her tale. Her lifelong rebellion is
altogether swept aside as other story tellers reestablish patriarchal norms.
In The Canterbury Tales, many scholars assert that the Wife empowers herself
through a rejection of societal expectations regarding women, differentiating her from
the other women depicted in the tales. These other women, the Prioress and the
Second Nun, are defined by their adherence to religious expectations, whereas the
Wife is characterized by her rejection of such patriarchal influences. John Ganim
argues that the Wife of Bath “appear[s] to be among the first characters to articulate
their needs, desires, lives, and circumstances in a fully developed and unified vision”
(225). She exemplifies what it means to be human, as she identifies herself as an
autonomous, coherent individual. The Wife sets herself apart from the Prioress and the
Second Nun not merely through her sexual liberation, but, more importantly, through
her rejection of defining herself in relation to religion. The Wife, then, uses her sexual
prowess to elevate her status in the eyes of men and still remain in control: “She is
able to see that the route to power and sovereignty in marriage is through gaining
control of her husband’s property by ransoming her sexual favors” (Gottfried 213).
The Wife repeatedly controls her husbands by whatever means possible, refusing to
confine herself as an obedient lover and opting instead to use deception as a tactic for
personal gain.
Though the Wife differentiates herself from the other women, she is all too
willing to exchange her worth for material value. The Wife’s autonomy is minimized
because her power is only achievable through using her body; she must reduce herself
to a sexual object to acquire any semblance of power in a medieval patriarchy, and the
status and wealth she gains is only material. The Wife of Bath boasts the illusion of
possessing agency in a male-dominant society, evidenced by the simplicity of her
name being Alisoun, the same name of the female object of desire in “The Miller’s
Tale.” The two characters having the same name discredits the nuances in Chaucer’s
characterization of the Wife and strips away her individuality. While the Wife
articulates her desires, Alisoun from “The Miller’s Tale” is sexualized before we learn
her name. Drawing these comparisons, John Slefinger claims that “the naming
[which] also comes in the form of an address makes her into a literal object:
something to be watched, observed, or questioned: not an independent agent like the
men” (158). Her individuality is locked behind her body, and she is only valued for
her sexual ability. The Miller’s Alisoun is not an agent of her own sexuality: before
we know who or what she desires, we know how physically attractive she is.
Additionally, Alisoun’s lovers in “The Miller’s Tale” recognize that she lacks
autonomy, a trait typical of most women in the thirteenth century. As such, they take
interest in Alisoun due to her sexual capacity, emphasized by Nicholas violating her
and then winning her affection: “This Nicholas gan mercy for to crye, / And spak so
faire, and profred him so faste, / That she hir love him graunted atte laste” (ll. 3288
90). That Alisoun completely lacks the Wife’s greatest strength, her sexual agency,
begs the question: why must they share the same name? Perhaps it serves to
exemplify how the patriarchy ignores the plight of women in their quest to rebel
against societal expectations. Despite the Wife possessing bodily autonomy where the
Miller’s Alisoun does not, they are both similarly relegated to a lower status indicated
by a series of comparisons to animals. The Miller’s Alisoun is sexualized through the
animals she is compared to, including a weasel, a colt, a lamb, and a swallow
(Slefinger 159). She is depicted as weasel–like, pure of nature, fair skinned, and
beautiful. These purely sexual and attractive characteristics tempt the male figures
around her, as Alisoun is represented as having no other motivation or purpose in life
other than sex. The Wife of Bath, on the other hand, is a distinct character, made up of
more than just her sexual experience. She is compared to a lioness: “Stiborn I was as
is a leonesse, / And of my tonge a verray jangleresse” (ll. 63738). Her lionlike
comparison shows her stubbornness and exotic nature, which may intimidate men
seeking sexual gratification. In a medieval patriarchy, men desire women like the
Miller’s Alisoun because she exhibits an animal-like simplicity that the Wife’s
complex nature and experience transcend.
Along with her nonconformity to societal expectations, the Wife of Bath also
challenges Christian-religious expectations of the time through her flouting of
religious doctrine. She seems proud of her multiple husbands and embraces sex as an
example of her independence from religious norms. In the tale she reaffirms the value
of virginity but excuses herself:
Virginitee is greet perfeccioun,
And continence eek with devocioun. […]
And lordinges, by youre leve, that am nat I.
I wol bistowe the flour of al myn age
In the actes and in fruit of marriage. (ll. 10506, 11214).
She acknowledges that most women devote themselves to religion, searching for a life
of purity and chastity until marriage. However, the Wife does not revel in her purity
but rather embraces her capacity to garner power from her sexual prowess. Even
though she differentiates herself from other women, her resistance against
stereotypical norms is still confined to the realm of sex and is only established in
relation to what other women fail to do. The Wife never defines herself outside of sex
in her medieval patriarchy, a trap that even a woman elevated in the eyes of men
cannot escape.
Another instance of the Wife attempting to empower herself is through her
manipulation of biblical Scripture. She justifies her overtly sexual actions by
distorting and removing the context of biblical verse. For instance, she disregards the
typical religious stance on marriage but quotes Scripture out of context to fit her
needs. Robert Edwards makes the point that she “may claim her right to interpret Holy
Writ for herself […] electing her texts carefully for her own purposes” (346). As an
older woman, the Wife uses her tale to potentially deceive younger men, promising
that when they marry her, she will be transformed into a beautiful wife, similarly to
the old woman of her tale. Since Christianity was the dominant ideology in medieval
Europe, the Wife can use the manipulation of Holy Scripture to justify her actions. As
such, she often turns to saints or religious figures to alleviate societal pressures
against her actions, using the biblical figure of Abraham to justify her multiple
husbands. If godly figures can indulge, she asks, why can she not?
Using this tactic, she also employs the actions of King Solomon to normalize
her lust for men, citing how he possessed seven hundred wives and three hundred
concubines. Furthermore, her tale is a “confessional,” a genre of storytelling that
follows the lines of the main character atoning for the sins they have committed.
Michael Cornett defines the confessional as “[f]unctioning as a mirror for self‐
examination, […] voic[ing] through a first‐person speaker the manifold variety of sins
that might be acknowledged by the penitent” (34). Telling these confessional stories,
like the sacrament of going to confession, is seen as a deeply religious practice, one
where sins can be cleansed. However, the Wife does not atone for her sins but, rather,
subverts the idea of the confessional and indulges in all her bodily desires. Edwards
acknowledges the Wife’s sensual individuality: “The energy of her performance
establishes her rhetorical echoes: she is a credible, sympathetic character, because she
seems to disown no part of her appetite” (328). She possesses sovereignty in both her
body and speech, demonstrating her resistance to patriarchal norms and her power
within the sexual economy of her marriages. Yet, the Wife’s manipulation of religion
does not truly justify her actions or give her more sovereignty. Shead denotes that one
of her more outlandish justifications is “her outrageous conclusion where she invokes
Jesus to send women ‘House-bondes meeke, yonge and fresshe abedde,’ [l. 1259] and
to shorten the lives of any men who will not be governed by their wives.” The Wife
inserts her own wants into her tale based on her own experiences, musing that Jesus’s
intervention is necessary for husbands to be governed by their wives. Although she
does not truly challenge Christian views, she does distort Scripture so she can justify
actions that would be condemned in the Church’s eyes. Due to her lack of power in
the patriarchy, the Wife feels it is necessary to redeem herself by referring to religious
figures because she realistically has no other method of empowering herself in
medieval society.
Though the patriarchal system of the medieval period is oppressive, the Wife
of Bath attempts to redefine herself, but her redefinition is flawed. Gottfried asserts
that her “assumptions, concerns, and attitudes make manifest the dialectical interplay
of experience and authority, rebellion and acquiescence. Thus, patriarchal society
generates both the misogynist literature she protests against, and the opposition to it
she herself embodies” (203). The Wife of Bath is a stubborn character, yet she
remains a product of her environment who uses the tools at her disposal in the attempt
for agency in a maledominated society. And though she differentiates herself, she is
still subject to the whims of the men around her. In her prologue, she reflects on her
abusive relationship with Jankyn: “I trowe I loved hym best, for that he / Was of his
love daungerous to me” (51314). Despite the abuse she has endured by his hand, she
still excuses his actions. Thus, her desire to please the men in her life overpowers her
logic, demonstrating that women are still beholden to patriarchal traditions at the risk
of their safety. However, she carries her love and experiences with her on her
journeys, changing and perhaps inspiring women in pursuit of sovereignty in
medieval society
Yet, inspiration is not enough and, ultimately, the Wife remains entrapped in
the patriarchal system. In resisting her disempowered status within medieval society,
the Wife is undermined by her own actions in three ways. First, she grants a happy
ending for the tainted knight in her tale; second, her reliance on seduction and sexual
prowess leads toward a demeaning resemblance to the Alisoun in “The Miller’s Tale”;
and third, the Wife distorts and quotes biblical Scripture out of context to justify her
lifestyle, in turn equating herself to the patriarchal religious figures she intends to
rebel against. Thereby, we can understand that though the Wife’s attempts at
redefining herself in a maledominant society are valiant, many aspects of the
patriarchy have already foreclosed on her ambition, and her attempts to redefine
womanhood and femininity are ultimately compromised throughout The Canterbury
Tales.